


Countdown

by nozenfordaddy (fenna_girl)



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-12
Updated: 2014-08-12
Packaged: 2018-02-12 21:16:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2124957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fenna_girl/pseuds/nozenfordaddy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He does the math without actually thinking about it to be honest, so he isn’t waiting for her to come back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Countdown

**Author's Note:**

> Much thanks to my betas various and sundry of you - you know who you are; and to [](http://nami86.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://nami86.livejournal.com/)**nami86** for the wonderful art that inspired this.

  
Thirty six hours. Possibly more.

Arthur has a need to be precise, to time real life the way they time the dreams. He knows Cobb’s plan was to fly in, find Eames (probably in the nearest gambling house) and get out before Cobol caught wind of his arrival. He knows the average flight time between Mombasa and Paris and the schedules of the various airlines since such details are his job.

He can do the math.

He does the math without actually thinking about it to be honest, so he isn’t waiting for her to come back. He has too much to take care of to focus on that. So much to do and thirty six hours minimum, forty eight if something goes wrong or Eames is on a bender, to do it in. Probably safe to assume forty eight.

He clicks through a mental list of tasks he has to accomplish before Cobb comes back, it would be tight, particularly if he has to train a new architect but he finds himself looking forward to it. To the challenge of course, to seeing what she can do in light of Cobb’s description of how naturally she’d picked up the flow of how things worked in dreams. Certainly he’d been as impressed with her show of pique and willingness to tell Cobb where to shove his job offer as Cobb had been with her speed and inventiveness within the dream but it was simply an amused interest because she was such a tiny slip of a girl and he’d seen grown men shrink under Cobb’s scrutiny.

He wasn’t counting, or clock watching, it was just the way his mind worked that he knew that she came back five hours after Cobb left. They need each hour they have to prepare. He knows the mark, the research that needs to be begun, and he knows what they will need by way of supplies when Cobb returns and planning begins in earnest. He knows what she will need to learn, the tricks and the secrets. These are things he’d learned over time but they don’t have the time to do it slowly, to take baby steps.

Luckily time moves more slowly in dreams but even with that he knows things will be tight. He’ll have to focus, and not on the new architect. Unfortunately.

Forty three hours left; he sets an internal countdown.

They start with paradoxical architecture; Penrose stairs, Escher in action and then move on to ways to increase the size of the dreamspace without adding too much complexity for the dreamer. Symmetric architecture, strange loops like mental mobius strips and Jacob’s ladder’s.

“We’re back where we started aren’t we?” She asks him suddenly as they are walking down a quiet stretch of pristine white sand beach along a tree lined wilderness. Cobb was right, she’s a natural in the dreamscape; it took her less time than he’d thought it would for her to pick up on it. It's the changeability, he thinks, that makes her uncertain more than anything else; the lack of solid, well-defined structures that could potentially stand forever. It’s an emotional block, not a mental one; she sees the dreamspace perfectly, with a clarity he envies but it can take time to accept that the things you build in dreams will not endure. That’s the hardest lesson he has to teach her in the end, to let go of the idea that anything she does will ever be tangible to anyone else.

“What makes you say that?”

“The footprints,” she points to a set of tracks in the sand obvious now that they aren’t back where the beach was teeming with people. “Those are our footprints.”

“I was wondering if you’d notice, most people don’t pay as much attention to the little things like that. They think they’re walking down a new stretch of beach so it all feels different even if it looks the same.”

She stops, glances back down the beach in the direction they came and tilts her head quizzically as she looks up at him, he can almost see the wheels turning as she works out how he did it, can see her calculating it, working out ways to add this kind of loop to the levels she’ll be designing. She smiles when she has it figured out.

“You created a closed loop.” He nods and she laughs, surprisingly he has to force himself not to notice the clear bell like quality of it. “In my head now we’re hanging upside down on the underside of the loop. Like that story, the Little Prince?”

“Where he can walk all the way around his planet,” he inclines his head toward the forest where the trees have started to merge and change, as though blooming in slow motion from generic conifer to Baobab trees like in the story that the Prince always had to pull up before they grew entrenched and destroyed everything.

“Don’t do that, everything will turn to dust if they take root.” Her hand brushes his sleeve and it might be the first time she’s touched him, usually he knows things like that but for a moment he can’t recall. The trees shift back into what they were though, he’s as loathe as she is to have this world collapse and he starts walking again, pulling away from her hand as though the touch is as potentially destructive to his peace of mind as the Baobab trees were to the Prince’s world.

“It’s the same principle as the Penrose stairs, it looks like a straight line but there’s a series of stages that cycle around. There is a shift from one level of abstraction to another by changing the scenery, adding a recreation area for the mark to fill with his subconscious; but the base remains unchanged. The shoreline, the trees the things we take for granted can be sheeted together over and over.”

He doesn’t check to make sure she’s following; he knows she’s there just beyond his peripheral vision without having to check.

***

Thirty two hours, he takes aim and fires. He’s a good shot, expert and he rarely misses when the target is so clear. He turns the gun on himself next, and when he opens his eyes she’s shaking, visibly fighting back tears. The first time is always a shock, Mal stabbing her in the gut was also crueler than usual the second time though is worse, because you know it’s going to hurt for a flash before you wake.

“Let me…” she shakes off his unfinished offer and takes a deep breath, adjusting the needle in her arm.

“Again.” He wishes they didn’t have to do this, worst case scenarios, swarming projections. He doesn’t want to have to kill her again and again to stop his own mind from destroying her but he does because it may save her life later. He mentally checks off a tally in his book, one more life. He’s discovered that in this world, as much as in his old one, every man has a number.

Some of the men he was trained with kept track in a book, paper and ink but he’s always preferred to keep track in his head. Or as close as he can; in the real world you don’t always know if your bullet hits the mark. Those men knew the number they'd killed, compared it the way they compared their scars but Arthur remembers for a different reason, remembers each face, each name. He has a number. It is accurate to the life, to the kill and none of them have ever bothered him the way her deaths do.

The third time is easier, for her, for him. By the fifth she’s stopped shaking. After a dozen she puts the gun to his head then her own and she barely flinches when she wakes.

***

Twenty six hours. He’s sent Ariadne home to get some sleep; she’s young and in grad school so she’s used to all nighters but all nighters that feel like weeks can be draining and he’d noticed dark bruises under her eyes as her exhaustion grew. She’ll sleep and bring back espresso and croissant when she returns, he estimates eight hours as he strips out of the suit he’s worn far too long. It’s creased where it shouldn’t be and his cuffs and collar are no longer crisp. He’ll be fine a few more days with little sleep outside the time spent training Ariadne but he needs a shower and a fresh change of clothes to feel human.

The facilities in the warehouse are small, but the shower itself is large. It isn't a separate enclosure; the line between shower and not-shower is demarcated by a slight ledge, just high enough to keep the water from pooling over the entire floor.

He can’t find it in himself to care about the primitive conditions.

He pushes thoughts of everything left to do before Cobb comes back with Eames aside and finishes getting undressed, quickly, efficiently. He folds his clothes, hanging his slacks over a makeshift bar so the steam can work on the creases and steps under the already running shower. The water is hot and the space is filled with steam, the warm dampness filling his lungs as he stands under the spray and lets it pound on tight muscles.

He knows what's coming, he knows what they're about to do – what his job entails – and he's anticipating, thrilled, terrified and he lets that occupy his thoughts instead of thinking about her. This is the way it has to be and he embraces it. His excitement will make him more alert and his fear will make him more fastidious; this will keep them all alive which is as much his job as mining the psychological and physical information on the subject so they are armed once inside Fisher’s subconscious.

The wild card is Ariadne. She is an unknown that he’s already realized he won’t be able to quantify on paper but that doesn’t stop him from trying. His fascination with her will do nothing but put them all at risk the way Cobb’s projection of Mal does and Arthur can only handle one emotional meltdown per job. He lets the wide spray of water wash off the day. It's soporific, unlike the rest of his life and his eyes droop heavily under the hot water letting it run into it turns cold and he starts to shiver.

He rubs down quickly, as efficient at this as he is at everything else and wraps the towel around his waist before walking back out into the main part of the warehouse to where he’s left his bag, and has a cot set up. Thirty minutes, he’ll power nap and change and then he can calibrate the equipment, finish his research and... he doesn’t see her, doesn’t realize she’s there until he’s run into her.

Instinctively he wraps an arm around her waist and twists so he softens her fall, sprawling in an ungainly heap on the cold cement floor, breathless and shocked into silence other than a sharp startled gasp from her when the fall brings then hard against each other.

Neither of them move for a long moment, fallen, they lay in a whirlwind of tangled limbs and bare skin, he can feel the edge of his towel dropping dangerously low but refuses to look down to verify its position or he’ll never be able to act nonchalant. Like it’s not both the most mortifying and yet hottest thing to happen him in a long while to have her tumbled on top of him while wearing nothing but a towel.

“I’m... I’m sorry.” She flushes, eyes locked with his and attempts to sit up but their limbs are too tangled and all she manages is to work the edge of the towel he is wearing loose.

“No apologies necessary,” he grips her arms to stop her movement, he was half hard already and isn’t particularly keen for her to discover this fact. “You surprised me is all.”

“Surprise is my ally,” she quips with a wry smile, trying to lighten the suddenly tense moment. “That and how light I am on my feet obviously.” It would look like something from a bad movie if someone were to walk into the warehouse right now. It would look like two people in flagrante, too wrapped up in the moment to care about where they are but the funny part - if you absolutely had to find something funny in the situation is that he doesn’t actually care.

"Damn," he mutters, fingers fluttering along the line of her jaw. "I wish I'd known I was going to have an epiphany, I would have dressed for it." If he stays this close to her, he is going to touch her, and there is no way he can justify it. No way will he be able to stop without more. He doesn’t have time for this, as much as he wishes things were different; not with the job to be done, and the hours counting down. Not with all the uncertainty about the job and Cobb’s mental state. He has to keep a calm, cool head in order to keep them all safe, and alive when this is over and nowhere on the list of things he had to do is ‘kiss the architect’, so he shifts her off of him and readjusts his towel so he can stand up.

“I should...” she glances at him briefly and then away again as he helps her to her feet. “I should go. I just came back to drop off some dinner for you...” As quickly as the moment began it ends, she takes a few steps back unable or unwilling to meet his gaze, embarrassed by the thoughtful gesture. It is then that he realizes that he’s not the only one who just had an epiphany. That she’s pretending not to see, the same way he is. Pretending that they don’t have a countdown to when this interlude has to end. He doesn’t stop her as she turns and rushes out of the warehouse and away from the thing neither of them has time to do anything about.

She’ll be back and for the moment that’s enough for him.

***

There's so much to do over the next few weeks that he barely sleeps, much less takes note of if anyone else sleeps but he still manages to know whenever she’s in the warehouse, knows when Cobb uses the PASIV under the guise of helping Yusuf. They require more specialized equipment than Arthur planned for and it takes time he doesn’t have to track it down. There is research; there are contacts to talk to and intel to gather. The first time he leaves the warehouse in over a week the afternoon is overcast, but the air feels fresh.

He concentrates on stepping over puddles, keeping his footing on the damp, dimpled stone steps as he makes his way to a nearby cafe to get something to drink. He pays for his cappuccino in cash and sits at a small table, he doesn’t have time but he needs this moment away from the rest of them. Away from her.

He senses Eames before he sees him, straightens up reflexively.

"Been waiting long?" He drops negligently into a chair and Arthur fights the urge to roll his eyes even though he finds himself envying the other man’s ease.

“I’m not waiting,” Eames laughs like Arthur just told a joke and he frowns not quite getting it.

“Of course you are darling; you just don’t know it yet.” Arthur can’t quite make himself ask for a bit of specificity, knows it will just add to the other mans mirth so he shrugs; looks past him to the street then back.

It might be the cold, it might be everything else, he doesn’t know but he’s wishing he brought a coat and soon they’re walking together back to the warehouse. Back inside, he does the geometry he learned from Miles years ago, knowing everyone’s positions without looking, calculating distance. Yusuf, bright and babbling, has cornered Saito in his lab and is waving around a vial of something Arthur hopes isn’t dangerous. He can’t help but glance toward Ariadne’s table but she’s not there.

"It's under control," Arthur insists when Eames shoots him a telling look. "I just have to keep up."

"That's harder than it sounds."

"It always has been." He senses her just beyond his field of vision; a quick glance confirms that she's talking to Cobb her laughter echoing in the large open space and he has to concentrate on placing his feet as he walks to his computer instead of going to join them.

***

Fourteen hours. He doesn’t know how he knows how long it has been when she shows up on his doorstep less than a full day after they all parted ways at the airport but he does. The sun is setting behind her, the colors wrenched from the palette by a night that doesn’t so much fall as collapse and he is too surprised to do anything except let her in.

He expects her to say something, to explain why she’s here, how she found him though he’s sure it was Eames who gave her his direction; instead she places one cold trembling hand against his cheek and brings her mouth to his without saying anything. It’s different in the waking world, her lips are softer, her taste and scent richer and the kiss lingers, the moment stretches and expands like a moment in a dream until he isn’t sure how long it has lasted.

"Took you long enough," he says, against her lips when they finally break enough for air. He's wanted this for a long time, probably since somewhere around the moment Cobb introduced them. He just always thought he'd have to ask for it, that he would have to chase her when everything was said and done and he didn’t have to live every moment by the ticking clock in his head.

It never occurred to him that he'd been asking all along, just without words.

He pulls back and looks down at her with a serious expression, being here with him means more than he thinks she realizes. It’s not just about them, it’s about the job, and her finishing school and her life never being normal again and he can’t let her make that choice without making sure she understands. Can’t offer her a new world, a new life, without making sure she knows all the consequences beforehand. He won’t ask her to jump off a cliff without telling her how to survive the fall the way Cobb did when he pulled her into their world.

"You need to be sure." He says as he slides one hand down her arm, and curves it around her hip, over her back as though convincing himself she’s real, burying his face in her hair drinking in the wild sunshine scent that is just her. Her scent would be a pale imitation in a dream and it reassures him that she’s real as much as his totem ever has.

"I'm sure." She doesn’t hesitate and she doesn’t pull away when he kisses her again, as though they have all the time in the world.


End file.
